“There is no silver bullet for promoting economic development. But what I think is very clear, and what I think the White House and the federal agencies have come to recognize through [the Power Africa] initiative, is that one of the major, and in many cases the number one, constraint on job growth [and] on economic development in Africa is a lack of affordable and reliable electricity. The data on business constraints is very clear: electricity is the number one constraint in most countries and, as we heard in the opening to the program, the lack of electricity has an effect on people’s health, on people’s education and on their livelihoods. I think it’s very important that the administration pull together all of these tools in a focused effort with specific targets to try to help alleviate this problem.”
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“It is both immoral and impractical for us to try and fight climate change through putting restrictions on power projects in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Just to give you a contrast, in the U.S. we have more than 3,000 power plants that run on fossil fuels. Ghana, one of the countries in Power Africa, has two. Ghana would like to build a few more. We are not going to deal with climate change problems by constraining Ghana [from building] two, four, six, eight [plants] when we have thousands of plants online. So the source of the problem is with us, and the demand for energy sources is in Africa. And we need to be sure that we are allowing flexibility for people to do what people everywhere do, which is build the electricity and energy that they need to have modern economies.”
Watch the interview here (Note: Todd Moss' commentary can be viewed at 26:05, 37:50 and 54:09)